The SCC Platform ZONE Completed Series A Financing of 70 Million RMB, Led by Blue Lake Capital

The SCC (Supply Chain Collaboration) platform ZONE (Shanghai Zhenyi Technology Co., Ltd.) announced the completion of Series A financing of 70 million RMB, led by Blue Lake Capital, followed by Redpoint, INFAITH GROUP, and YI Capital, with Yiren Capital as the exclusive financial advisor.

“Complete supply chain digitization should internally improve the efficiency of departmental collaboration while supporting multi-party collaboration with the external supply chain. Disappointingly, the fact that enterprises prefer to apply IIS (Inside Information Systems) + SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) while in the integration of internal and external SCM (Supply Chain Management) means they still need to arrange people to be stationed at the production sites of offline suppliers and OEMs to monitor real-time progress, inspect quality, manage costs, support business upgrades, establish traceability systems for multi-party collaboration plans, and regularly dispense feedback to concerned departments using relevant business systems (or by sending word or excel documents via email or WeChat). All of this not only takes time and effort, but requires plenty of manpower,” explained Zheng Xiangtian, CEO of ZONE.

Considering that, ZONE—incubated in China’s well-known IT consulting service provider, HAND—started using SCC to further its SCM in 2020. Its core product, Zone Cloud, an SCC SaaS platform, connects the demand side (large manufacturing enterprises or brands) with the supply side (suppliers and OEMs). Besides the application, customers can connect to the business systems of suppliers through the Octopus connector—a real-time production schedule tracker developed by ZONE to reduce internal waste, minimize conflict between supply and demand sides, and achieve common goals through early warnings (and timely control) of problems with delivery time, quality, and cost.

Specifically, ZONE proposes solutions for various cases, including master data collaboration, multiple suppliers, OEM manufacturing process, inventory management, change management and statistical analysis, quality forwarding and traceability, supply chain planning, supplier logistics, checking, supply chain exception sensing, analysis, and other cases that require supply- and demand-side collaboration.

Within two years of independent operation, ZONE has over 50 cooperative customers in various fields, including equipment manufacturing, lithium support, 3C, footwear, central kitchen pre-prepared dishes, and other fields, and over 1,000 linked supply-side enterprises.

Revenue mainly comes from two areas: SaaS subscription fees, including the basic and deep collaboration versions, with an average unit price ranging from 100,000 to 300,000, and an SaaS service fee, which is calculated separately, according to demand.

There are nearly 200 members of ZONE, of which 60% are product researchers. It’s reported that this round of financing was mainly used for product development and marketing.

Ray Hu, the founder and managing partner of Blue Lake Capital, had this to say:

“Enterprises have a higher demand for monitoring OEMs and suppliers with the digitization of the supply chain. However, a complete solution that satisfies enterprises well does not exist in this field.

ZONE aims to meet these needs by building a software platform that involves understanding production processes, adapting multiple business systems, and polishing out-of-the-box tools. It seems to be simple but requires continuously integrating diverse customer scenarios into a standardized SaaS product.

ZONE has accumulated over ten years of relevant experience. We are optimistic that ZONE will help Chinese companies build a tighter supply chain network to improve efficiency.”